Common Fund: Secure Grants 2025 Success!

Why the NIH Common Fund is Your Gateway to Transformative Research Funding

The Common Fund is the NIH’s premier funding mechanism for bold, cross-cutting scientific programs that catalyze findy across all biomedical and behavioral research. For researchers pursuing high-risk, high-reward projects that span multiple disciplines, the Common Fund is a key resource.

Key Common Fund Facts:

• Purpose: Supports transformative, time-limited programs (10 years or less).
• Focus: Cross-institute collaboration and removing research roadblocks.
• Funding: Two tracks – Standard programs and nimble Venture initiatives (up to $5M annually for 3 years).
• Requirements: Projects must be transformative, catalytic, goal-driven, synergistic, and novel.
• Management: Overseen by the Office of Strategic Coordination within the NIH Office of the Director.

The Common Fund differs from organizations with similar names. While the Commonfund for Non-Profit Organizations manages investment portfolios, the NIH Common Fund specifically funds cutting-edge biomedical research that no single NIH institute could tackle alone.

Recent programs like PRIMED-AI, Oculomics, and SysBio exemplify the Fund’s mission to accelerate emerging science and improve the research workforce through collaborative, consortium-based approaches.

As Maria Chatzou Dunford, CEO of Lifebit, I’ve seen how Common Fund initiatives drive breakthrough findings in precision medicine and data integration. My experience in computational biology and genomics has shown me the power of these well-funded, collaborative research programs.

Common Fund terms simplified:

• Cancer Moonshot
• Defense Health Agency

Understanding the NIH Common Fund vs. Other “Common Funds”

For researchers new to federal funding, the term “Common Fund” can be confusing due to similarly named organizations. It’s crucial to distinguish the NIH Common Fund from others.

What is the NIH Common Fund?

The NIH Common Fund supports transformative biomedical research, acting as an innovation hub to address complex problems that fall outside the scope of a single institute. Its hallmark is a cross-cutting approach, uniting scientists from diverse fields to tackle universal health challenges. These high-risk, high-reward projects aim to revolutionize our understanding of health and disease. This means the Fund invests in research with a high probability of failure but the potential for exceptionally high impact if successful, pushing the boundaries of what is considered possible.

Formally established by the NIH Reform Act of 2006, the Common Fund is managed by the Office of the Director through the Office of Strategic Coordination. This unique position gives it the authority and flexibility to operate across all 27 NIH Institutes and Centers, fostering collaboration and addressing scientific challenges that are too broad or complex for any single entity. This structure allows the Fund to be agile and responsive to the most pressing needs and opportunities in biomedical science. This collaborative space launches bold scientific programs, catalyzing findy that benefits the entire research community. You can learn more on their official Who We Are & What We Do page.

Distinguishing from Commonfund for Non-Profit Organizations

An unrelated organization, Commonfund, is an asset management firm founded in 1971. It manages investment portfolios for institutional investors like universities, endowments, and foundations. This firm is involved in finance, not biomedical research grants.

Similarly, “The Common Fund for Nonprofit Organizations” pools investment funds for educational institutions. For research funding, the NIH Common Fund is the correct entity.

The Mission: Accelerating Science and Removing Roadblocks

NIH Common Fund programs are strategic, time-limited (typically 10 years or less), and highly goal-driven. This focus allows the Fund to concentrate resources on specific challenges to develop solutions. The 10-year “sunset” provision ensures that programs deliver concrete outcomes and do not become permanent fixtures, allowing the Fund to continually reinvest in new, emerging areas of science.

The results often become new tools, public datasets, or transformative technologies. The mission is to improve the research workforce and accelerate emerging science. By fostering collaboration among investigators who might not otherwise work together, the Common Fund dismantles roadblocks in research, an approach vital for accelerating genomics and bioinformatics advancements in a data-driven world.

How the NIH Common Fund Works: Programs and Initiatives

The NIH Common Fund invests in bold scientific ideas with the potential to transform how we understand and treat disease. It supports research that is too large, risky, or cross-cutting for any single NIH institute to handle alone, turning ambitious scientific goals into reality.

Types of Programs: Standard vs. Venture Initiatives

The Common Fund offers two distinct pathways for researchers. Understanding which path fits your vision is key to a successful application.

Standard Common Fund Programs are comprehensive initiatives tackling significant, long-standing scientific challenges. These programs run for up to 10 years, providing the resources to create new paradigms, build essential tools, and generate public datasets for future research.

Venture Initiatives, launched in 2024, are nimble, three-year programs capped at $5 million annually. They are designed to respond quickly to emerging scientific opportunities or address urgent priorities across NIH. Their agility allows for rapid pivoting as new opportunities arise. Explore more on the Venture Program page.

Here’s how they compare:

Feature	Standard Common Fund Programs	Venture Initiatives
Duration	Up to 10 years	Up to 3 years
Budget	Larger, comprehensive investments	Up to $5 million annually
Scope	Addresses significant, long-standing challenges	Agile, responsive to emerging opportunities
Goal	Foundational resources, new paradigms	Rapid, high-impact acceleration
Flexibility	Structured, long-term planning	Nimble, bold, focused, accelerated timelines

Key Criteria for a Common Fund Proposal

Every successful Common Fund proposal must meet six essential criteria:

• Transformative: The research must aim to fundamentally change how a scientific problem is understood or approached. This goes beyond incremental advances; it seeks to challenge existing paradigms or create entirely new capabilities. A transformative project often carries high risk but promises exceptionally high reward. For example, the Human Connectome Project aimed to build a complete map of the brain’s structural and functional connections, a goal that shifted the paradigm of neuroscience research.

• Catalytic: The program’s outputs must serve as a springboard for the broader research community. This means creating resources—such as datasets, technologies, or methodologies—that enable other researchers to make their own discoveries. The Human Microbiome Project, for instance, generated foundational datasets and protocols that catalyzed an entire field of research into the microbiome’s role in health and disease, leading to thousands of subsequent studies.

• Synergistic: The project must bring together multiple NIH institutes and scientific disciplines in a way that creates an outcome greater than the sum of its parts. It requires genuine integration of diverse expertise, not just a collection of parallel projects. The Glycoscience program, for example, unites chemists, biologists, and data scientists to create tools for studying complex sugars (glycans) that no single discipline could develop alone.

• Novel: The proposed approach or the problem it addresses must be unique and not currently being pursued by any single NIH institute. The project should fill a critical gap or “white space” in the biomedical research landscape, tackling a challenge that requires a trans-NIH approach to solve.

• Goal-Driven: The initiative must have clearly defined deliverables, milestones, and measurable outcomes that are achievable within the program’s specified timeline (typically 10 years or less). This focus on concrete goals and a “sunset” provision ensures that programs are focused on producing tangible results and allows the Fund to reinvest in new priorities.

• Bold and Focused: The proposal must balance a grand, ambitious vision with a practical, well-defined, and executable plan. It needs to be daring enough to be transformative but focused enough to have a clear path to achieving its specific scientific objectives. This is especially critical in fields like data-driven drug findy, where bold ideas require clear, achievable goals.

Examples of Current and Recent Programs

These programs showcase the breadth and ambition of the Common Fund:

• PRIMED-AI: The Pre-Medical-AI and Imaging for Precision Medicine program aims to develop and benchmark AI/ML models for disease diagnosis and risk prediction, using integrated datasets that include imaging, clinical, and molecular data. It focuses on ensuring these models are ethically developed and generalizable across diverse populations.
• Oculomics: As an early Venture Program initiative, Oculomics explores the eye as a “window to health.” It seeks to develop novel, non-invasive technologies to diagnose systemic diseases (like cardiovascular or neurological conditions) by analyzing various components of the eye.
• SysBio: The Systems Biology for Infectious Diseases program creates unified platforms and computational models to integrate diverse biological datasets (genomics, proteomics, metabolomics). The goal is to enable a systems-level understanding of host-pathogen interactions and infectious diseases.
• Complement-ARIE: This program focuses on enhancing the rigor, reproducibility, and translatability of animal research by developing new tools and approaches to study animal models in more physiologically relevant and complex environments.
• NBS X WGS Collaboratory: This initiative explores the ethical, legal, and social implications (ELSI) of using whole-genome sequencing (WGS) for newborn screening, creating a knowledge base to inform future policy and practice.
• Advancing Non-Invasive Optical Approaches: This program develops and disseminates next-generation optical technologies, such as advanced microscopy, to enable researchers to study the structure and function of living systems in real-time and at unprecedented resolution.

These examples highlight the Fund’s range, from AI and genomics to animal research, all creating resources that will benefit the scientific community for years. Explore the full portfolio on the Current Programs page.

Step-by-Step Guide to Applying for NIH Funding

Securing a Common Fund grant becomes more manageable when broken down into clear steps.

Step 1: Identifying Relevant Funding Opportunities

Knowing where to look for funding opportunities is the first step. The NIH Guide for Grants and Contracts is the central hub for all NIH funding announcements, including Notices of Funding Opportunity (NOFOs), which provide detailed instructions, eligibility criteria, and deadlines.

Program Announcements (PAs) are broader invitations for investigator-initiated research in areas of interest to the NIH. For Common Fund applicants, Requests for Information (RFIs) are particularly valuable. While not funding opportunities themselves, RFIs gather community input on potential new programs, offering insight into future priorities. Responding to RFIs can help shape the direction of future Common Fund initiatives.

Regularly check the NIH Common Fund website’s “Program Updates” and “Planning Activities” sections for announcements. You can search for funding opportunities directly, and understanding these mechanisms will help you stay ahead of clinical trial technology trends.

Step 2: Developing Your Research Proposal

Translating your scientific vision into a compelling proposal is crucial. Your Specific Aims page is your one-page elevator pitch, stating your goal and measurable objectives. For Common Fund grants, this page must demonstrate how your project is transformative, catalytic, synergistic, novel, and goal-driven.

The Research Strategy section details the significance, innovation, and approach of your work, aligning it with the Common Fund‘s mission of supporting cross-cutting, high-impact science. If your research involves human subjects, a rock-solid Data and Safety Monitoring Plan is required and must be approved by your IRB and the NIH.

Assembling a Synergistic Research Team: Because Common Fund projects are inherently collaborative, demonstrating a well-integrated, interdisciplinary team is paramount. Your proposal must go beyond simply listing collaborators. It should clearly articulate how the diverse expertise of team members (e.g., from computational biology, clinical medicine, engineering, and ethics) will be combined to achieve the project’s ambitious goals. Reviewers look for evidence of a true intellectual partnership, not just a collection of individual projects.

Your Budget Justification should provide clear reasons for all requested costs, showing your budget is both reasonable and necessary. Highlight how your project fosters collaboration and generates resources that other researchers can build upon, a principle we also emphasize when designing successful clinical trials.

Step 3: The Submission and Review Process

Most NIH applications are submitted through Grants.gov. Register well in advance, as the process can take weeks. Once submitted, you can track your application’s status through eRA Commons.

The peer review process involves evaluation by scientific experts based on merit, significance, innovation, and approach. For Common Fund applications, reviewers also assess how well the proposal addresses the specific criteria of the opportunity. Your application will receive an Impact Score (10-90, lower is better) reflecting its potential influence.

After the initial peer review, Common Fund applications undergo a second level of review by the NIH Council of Councils. This council, composed of representatives from NIH advisory councils and other experts, evaluates the proposal’s relevance to the Common Fund’s strategic goals and its potential for trans-NIH impact. Following this review, the NIH Director makes the final funding decisions based on the scientific merit, programmatic relevance, and availability of funds.

After review, you will receive a Summary Statement with detailed critiques and recommendations. This feedback is invaluable for improvement, even if the application is not funded on the first attempt. Persistence is key, as transformative research often involves risks that can lead to breakthrough findings down the road.

Leveraging Data and Technology for a Winning Proposal

A modern Common Fund proposal requires a solid technology foundation to handle the massive datasets and complex collaborations inherent in transformative research. A strong data management plan is the backbone of your project, ensuring your results can be shared with the broader scientific community.

Building a Robust Data Management and Sharing Plan

The NIH requires your Data Management and Sharing Plan to make data useful to researchers worldwide. This plan should be guided by FAIR data principles to maximize the impact of your Common Fund investment.

• Findable: Your plan must specify how data will be discoverable. This includes assigning globally unique and persistent identifiers (like DOIs) and creating rich metadata that describes the data’s context, quality, and origin, allowing it to be found through public data catalogs.
• Accessible: Data must be retrievable by its identifier using a standardized communications protocol. The plan should clarify how access will be provided, including any necessary authentication and authorization steps, especially for sensitive human data.
• Interoperable: To allow for data integration, your plan should commit to using formal, accessible, and broadly applicable languages for knowledge representation, such as controlled vocabularies, ontologies, and common data models (e.g., OMOP).
• Reusable: To maximize future use, data should have a clear usage license and detailed provenance. The plan must describe how you will ensure the data is well-documented and adheres to community standards, enabling others to replicate findings and conduct new analyses.

Your proposal must also address data harmonization to standardize data from multiple sites and data governance to define access, protect privacy, and ensure compliance with regulations like HIPAA and GDPR. Planning for these is essential, and overcoming data harmonization challenges and implementing AI-enabled data governance are key to success.

Budgeting for Data Infrastructure and Personnel

A common oversight in grant proposals is underestimating the costs associated with robust data management. Your budget justification must include specific, well-defended line items for the resources needed to execute your Data Management and Sharing Plan. This includes costs for data curation, storage infrastructure, software licenses for analysis platforms, and the personnel required to manage it all. Consider including dedicated roles like data stewards, bioinformaticians, or data curators, and clearly explain their responsibilities. Reviewers will scrutinize this section to ensure your data plan is not just an afterthought but a financially supported, integral part of your research strategy.

Utilizing Trusted Research Environments (TREs) for Secure Collaboration

For projects with sensitive data from multiple institutions, Trusted Research Environments (TREs) are essential. TREs provide secure data access, allowing researchers to analyze sensitive datasets without the data leaving its secure location. This model reduces breach risks while enabling large-scale collaboration.

TREs are designed for compliance with strict regulations like GDPR and HIPAA. Understanding what a Trusted Research Environment is helps you proactively address security concerns in your proposal. They also offer scalable analysis capabilities for computationally intensive tasks and can facilitate industry partnerships for research translation. Learn how TREs support data commercialization while protecting sensitive information.

The Power of Federated Data Analysis

Federated data analysis allows you to run studies across distributed datasets without centralizing them, a perfect fit for many Common Fund initiatives. This approach enables the analysis of distributed data from institutions that cannot share raw data, expanding the scope and diversity of your research.

Privacy-preserving technology generates insights from sensitive datasets without exposing individual records. This is crucial for analyzing real-world data from diverse sources to study rare diseases or population health trends. Federated Data Analysis provides a detailed look at this technology.

For multi-omics data integration, federated data lakehouses offer the necessary infrastructure to manage and analyze massive, complex datasets. The key features of federated data lakehouses are ideal for ambitious research. Incorporating these technologies demonstrates your project is designed for maximum impact and usability.

Frequently Asked Questions about the NIH Common Fund

Applying for Common Fund grants can be complex. Here are answers to some of the most common questions.

How are new Common Fund programs selected?

The selection process is collaborative and community-driven. It begins with the NIH issuing Requests for Information (RFIs) to gather ideas from the scientific community on emerging opportunities or research roadblocks. These ideas are then reviewed and prioritized by NIH Institute and Center Directors through a series of strategic planning workshops and discussions. The final decision is made by the NIH Director after multiple stages of input and refinement from scientific experts and the Council of Councils. This ensures that selected programs address high-priority, cross-cutting challenges aligned with the Common Fund‘s mission.

Can international researchers apply for Common Fund grants?

Yes, foreign institutions and international organizations are often eligible to apply for Common Fund grants, either as the primary applicant or as a component of a domestic application. However, eligibility varies by program. Each Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) specifies its own rules. Always check the “Eligible Organizations” and “Foreign Institutions” sections of the NOFO before preparing a proposal. For foreign components, the proposal must justify why the collaboration provides unique resources or expertise not available in the U.S. If you are unsure, contact the scientific contact person listed in the announcement for clarification.

What is the difference between a Program Announcement (PA) and a Request for Applications (RFA)?

The key differences are specificity and funding. A Program Announcement (PA) is a broad invitation for applications in a general research area of interest to one or more NIH institutes. PAs typically do not have funds set aside, and applications are reviewed alongside the general pool of investigator-initiated grants.

A Request for Applications (RFA) is a more targeted call for proposals to address a specific scientific gap or program objective. RFAs have dedicated funding set aside and a single submission deadline. Most Common Fund initiatives are announced through RFAs due to their specific, goal-driven, and synergistic nature. Understanding this distinction is crucial for tailoring your application strategy.

What are common pitfalls to avoid in a Common Fund application?

Several common mistakes can weaken a Common Fund proposal. The most frequent is proposing research that is incremental rather than truly transformative. Reviewers are looking for paradigm-shifting ideas, not just the next logical step. Another pitfall is failing to demonstrate genuine synergy; a proposal that looks like a “collection of projects” from different labs, rather than a deeply integrated, collaborative effort, will not score well. Other mistakes include underestimating the resources and expertise needed for data management and sharing, failing to articulate why the project is uniquely suited for the Common Fund (i.e., why it couldn’t be funded by a single NIH institute), and not clearly defining measurable milestones and deliverables.

How does the Common Fund measure the success of its programs?

Success is not measured solely by publications but by the program’s long-term impact on the biomedical research community. The Common Fund uses a variety of metrics to conduct formal evaluations. Key indicators of success include the widespread adoption of new tools, technologies, and datasets developed by the program; the number and impact of publications from outside researchers who used the program’s resources; the creation or significant advancement of new research fields; and evidence that the program’s outputs have been integrated into mainstream research or clinical practice. Ultimately, a successful program is one that has fulfilled its catalytic role by lowering barriers and enabling future scientific breakthroughs across multiple disciplines.

Conclusion

The NIH Common Fund provides unique opportunities to fund transformative research that can reshape entire scientific fields. This guide has covered how this mechanism supports bold, cross-disciplinary biomedical research that no single institute could manage alone.

We’ve distinguished the NIH Common Fund from other entities, detailed its Standard and Venture programs, and outlined the key criteria for a successful proposal: being transformative, catalytic, synergistic, novel, and goal-driven. The application process, though rigorous, is navigable, from identifying opportunities in the NIH Guide to the peer review process.

Success with Common Fund grants increasingly relies on managing complex, multi-institutional data collaborations. Modern technologies like Trusted Research Environments and federated data analysis are critical for secure, compliant, and impactful research. By incorporating these data-driven approaches, you demonstrate that your project is designed for broad usability and lasting impact.

Current programs like PRIMED-AI, Oculomics, and SysBio exemplify the Fund’s commitment to creating resources that benefit the entire scientific community, catalyzing findy for years to come.

The Common Fund offers the platform and resources to turn your ambitious vision into reality. By embracing secure collaboration technologies, you can position your work to make a significant impact on the biomedical research landscape.

Ready to take the next step? Learn how Lifebit supports Federal Health initiatives and find how our platform can strengthen your Common Fund proposal with robust data management and federated analytics capabilities.